I went on a long walk the other day along the Charles River. It was a lovely day, wonderfully sunny, but very windy. I was almost blown away a couple of times, as you can tell by the pictures.
As I crossed the Longfellow Bridge back towards Cambridge, guess what I saw? I observed some markings along the bridge, which seemed to be a type of measurement system, using “Smoots” as the unit of measurement. Ms. Fuezery then told me the story of how the length of the bridge was measured by several MIT engineers. Their unit of measurement was the “Smoot”, which was the length of a specific person, named Smoot. Every so often they would mark how far along the bridge you had progressed, in Smoots. What a whimsical idea!
After that, of course, I had to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, which is found just at the end of the bridge. It was absolutely beautiful! I found a really interesting statue of a person’s upper torso, made entirely out of metallic mathematical symbols and numbers, all painted white. It was a great adventure!
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